from: erich-moechel {AT} quintessenz.at
date: Wed, 10 Jun 1998 01:02:34 +0200
subject: Re: <nettime> Question: Europe on the internet?
David S. Bennahum wrote:
> For instance the as-usual-stupid French
> government forbids French people from registering .fr sites for personal use.
> This sort of arrogant, pro-business,
pro-state, excuse me David, this attitude is first case
_pro-state_
The french are always being punished by new technologies - being
too soon & too late.
Just two examples:
>From 1792 (oh yes that date) they had an optic telegraph network
from the Atlantic to Northern Italy, From the Pyrenees to the
German border (One central knot at the Tuileries) more than
decade before other European nations had a single longer line.
Everybody wondered then, why Napoleon was so quick in moving his
armies...
In the late 1840ies the French therefore were among the last in
Europe to introduce morse-lines. Even top/reactionary Austria
worked on morse before.
In the late eighties/early nineties of our century nowhere in
Europe a state owned or monopolist third-class electronic
communications system succeeded but in France.
They have Minitel - why should they use the net ;-)
cu
erich
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date: Tue, 9 Jun 1998 17:17:02 -0800
from: b c <schizo {AT} sirius.com>
subject: Re: <nettime> Question: Europe on the internet?
<////////////rip/////////////////////////////////////////////////////>
David S. Bennahum:
>For instance the as-usual-stupid French
>government forbids French people from registering .fr sites for personal use.
>This sort of arrogant, pro-business, anti-individual hubris is an excellent
>example of dumb, neurotic, protectionist, internet policies. In france that
>means French people must register personal domains in the USA, as .COM or
>whatever, or in some other country, further reinforcing the jingoist french
>neurosis that the internet is another anglo-saxon conspiracy to trammel on the
>their culture..
it seems an ironic example, unevenly reinforcing the
equation that both; the individual is constituted as
being a private commercial institution (human.com),
and that the alternative to this is to compose oneself
as consisting of nationality as identity (human.fr).
this, to me, reinforces an cultural imperialism of the
Internet and its story of development. unaware of the
new naming conventions, could these, as language, be a
'formatting' of the structures of our realities online?
[vaguely thinking that, trying to constitute the person
as public individual online, today would consist of one-
self being declared a non-profit organization (human.org)]
i wonder what the linguists have to say about this...
bc
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